


Inumbrate

by EarthedLightning



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fix-It, Post-Canon, Stabbing, fix-it with murder, vengeance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:47:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23737081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthedLightning/pseuds/EarthedLightning
Summary: Four months after Woodes Rogers is arrested, Anne Bonny pays him a visit.
Relationships: Anne Bonny/Mary Read
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Inumbrate

**Author's Note:**

> I hate Woodes Rogers so much and I don’t like that he survives the narrative. I am of course open to Max/Anne as endgame, but I think it might take them some time to get there. Rogers is in debtors' prison on New Providence Island because it's convenient for me, don't worry about it.

Rogers had been in prison nearly four months before Anne’s plans finally fell into place. Four months of doing what she was still unskilled at, of working quietly behind the scenes to put members of Teach’s former crew in charge of guarding Rogers’s cell. She had put herself into considerable personal debt to make it so. She had told nobody, not Jack and not Max, and not even Mary, though she felt it under her tongue when the two of them lay together in the silvery moonlight. But she had said nothing, and had kept the hot spike of hate burning behind her ribs all this time.

That night she waited, quiet and still, until Mary’s breathing steadied. Her lover slept deeply and Anne stole away without much effort. She slunk through the reformed, newly colonial streets of Nassau, empty in the starless night. At the recently established prison, she went around to the side entrance, usually used for rubbish removal and tonight, left ever so slightly ajar. Inside, she walked down a hallway carefully emptied of prisoners over the past few weeks, some pardoned of their crimes, some executed, some simply transferred quietly to the second storey. At the hallway’s end, a door with a single guard. He nodded to her, eyes shining in the flickering torchlight, and turned the key already waiting in the lock.

Woodes Rogers was trying and failing to sleep. He spent a lot of time in that state, these days. But he still managed to dress each morning, and to write. His second memoir, when he published it upon his release, would far outsell his first. The situation might seem difficult just now, but there was always reprieve for an Englishman. God, if not King and Country, would deliver him. He told himself this each day that he was forced to spend in this backwater outpost, in this hastily built gaol run by criminals posing as English subjects. He was musing on all the ways he would ask Whitehall to punish this godforsaken island upon his return to civilization when the lock clicked open.

Anne stepped into the cell and watched Rogers register her presence. He was gaunt, the purpling circles under his eyes betraying how far his health had deteriorated. The scar on the side of his face stood out against the pallor of his skin. It was a vivid red, as though it was a far more recent wound than Anne knew it to be. Curled as he was in his cot, half-risen to his elbows, he looked almost pitiful. But she could see his eyes in the half light, could see the depth of them, and she knew he felt no remorse for what he had done, for any of it. She drew her knife and stepped forward.

“Wait, I –” Rogers held out a shaking hand to stop her, but she did not slow, she did not stop, she did not let him speak. She pressed her knife into the hollow of his throat and straight out the other side, and she did not look into his desperate, uncomprehending eyes. She held her knife still against his convulsions, her hand gripping his shoulder, until his muscles started to slacken. And then she shoved him back onto his bed, wiped her knife on his sheets, and left before he stopped trying to breathe around the burbling flow of blood. 

She nodded to the guard, who was ready to frame one of his colleagues come sunrise (a vicious man and a drunk, a man who hurt women, who regularly attacked men – she had chosen him with great care). She walked back out of the prison the way she had come but took a different route back to her rooms. She had felt a hate for Rogers so powerful it had nearly drowned her, and now she felt nothing at all. It was always this way – a man was dead, and the balance was restored. Once home, she slipped her boots off and eased herself back into bed beside Mary, who was snoring gently in a way Anne found equal parts endearing and irritating. She could feel a soul-deep exhaustion pulling at her bones. She would sleep, she knew, deep and dreamlessly. And when she awoke, it would be to a world in which one more injustice had been answered.


End file.
